This is a three wire voltage to current loop converter. The 1-5 V DC is attenuated and fed to pin 5 LM723 opamp section which tries to maintain the same voltage at pin 10 across the 10 E, thereby producing a open collector constant current sink proportional to the 1-5V input. By trimming the attenuator you can scale-calibrate 1-5V input to 4-20mA output for looping many instruments in series, like a controller, recorder or PLC. With a supply voltage upto 24V, three instruments can be looped. The connection to pin 6 is required to convert 0-1 input to 4-20mA.

IC 555 is used as an astable oscillator and it flashes the Infra red LED D1 at a high speed, The object close to this LED reflects the light along with the ambient light which may also be sunlight.

IR Led’s and Diodes The types available are various and polarity hard to detect even photo IR transistors can be used. The IR Led can be tested in diode mode of a DMM (battery should be in good condition) it should give around 1.1V drop in proper polarity.

An IR detector diode or photo diode can be tested in the same way the drop will be 0.5V at 1 feet from a 60W lamp (no sunlight), closing the IR photo diode with your hand will be an over range on DMM this will happen on proper polarity. the photo diode shows around 10k ohm resistance in daylight and in Mega ohms when covered also the photo diode detects light on reverse bias and used like that.